RETAILORS might remember, as we have often suggested, to make their brand management an ongoing process of reinventing customer experiences and providing more personalized mobile engagements. For retailors, their creative strategies must now be based on their target customers’ own positioning of their most relevant attributes, differences and behaviors. Customers’ self-brand perceptions rely on their omni-present sources of contact, information and cultural sharing. The concept of “everywhereness” is a current zeitgeist in the mobile world, as exhibited in the Tracfone Everywhereness commercials.

Retail innovations by leading retailers mandate that all their strategic planning is a brand retailoring that evolves from their study of the current evolution of our species, technologically. Quickly gone is the concept of the physical “retail store” as a shopping destination or necessity. Struggling to remain relevant is the mission, “should you choose to accept it.” We hope it will not be a “Mission Impossible.”

Drawing by Art Winters

There is no doubt that mobile is now a bio-digital part of the customer, aka 21st Century Human. For example, living within all the “everywhereness,” retailors must consider that there is a stronger customer’s need for individuality, as exhibited through an interest in fashion tailor-mades or bespoke products – from clothing and accessories to automobiles. Mobile customers are quickly adopting and increasing their mobile “self-styling” options. Changing their shopping behavior more readily than those who are store-only shoppers. Retailors are building their “everywhereness” opportunities to attract more customers with new personalized mobile apps and interactive options.

Inevitably, retailers have to consider “showrooming” as a challenge. How should they strategically respond to this use of their physical store as a showroom and the Internet sites as the P.O.S.? Certainly the retailor is actively working to provide targeted CX (Customer Experiences) that offer personalized mobile and in-store service and incentives that would also advance their NPS (Net Promoter Score). Also, brand managers should be creating new, innovative, and more customer interaction options for their ever-changing loyalty programs and tailor-made offerings. The retailor must realize that since mobile technology enables the customer to shop many stores on their own time, from wherever they choose, it is time to get creative and inventive. Work at brand “relate-ability” with self-visualizations of value and helpful relevant touch points for the customer’s tailor-made desires.

Our thought is: “If retailers want to be anywhere, they must now be everywhere.”